Exactly.

Regular season college basketball is a bore because basketball is a fucking bore. Imagine how many fans college basketball would have if it had a BCS-like postseason. Three or four, tops.

I know based on BCS apologists’ constant arguments that this can’t truly be the case, since they all determine their championships via a playoff system. But man, oh man, do they carry out their pretense to extremes! They pretend to really get up for their “meaningless” games, and pretend passion at least as fervent as D-1 colleges have. They even cry real tears at losses, and celebrate wins with complete abandon.

It’s almost as though they really, truly care about the games, with an enjoyment undiluted by the fact that they will eventually have a championship determined on the field of play…

Had Colt not tackled Brian Jackson on that INT in the Cotton Bowl, and had Texas lost that game 20-16 as a result, would the subsequent weeks’ games against Oklahoma State or Missouri been anywhere near as meaningful? We’ve known, essentially, since before the season that we wouldn’t be able to survive a loss and still make it to the championship game. I think a lot of Texas fans – myself included – would have found our chances ruined with a loss in Dallas.

If there’s an eight- or 12-team playoff, though, those games with OSU and Mizzou would have still been incredibly meaningful even with a loss to OU. We would have still had a chance to work our way back up the rankings and earn a higher seed. Finish the season 11-1, on a six-game winning streak, and we’re probably #6 and feeling good about ourselves.

I can buy some arguments in support of the BCS, but this one is just absurd.

That’s a similar ratio of games that would matter in football as well. But football is exciting and basketball isn’t?

Of course, great teams win on talent most of the time. That’s not news.

Brick, why does your brain stop on regular-season college football and consider that a compartmentalized whole, when D-I college football is the only game I can think of beyond junior high in this country that doesn’t have some kind of playoff system to determine a winner?

Did you really bite your nails over ULa-La, UTEP, Wyoming, Baylor, etc.? And that’s not just a Texas scheduling issue. This “the regular season is the most exciting in sports” is the biggest red herring of this debate. First, under the current system, each season has at least one week when the “marquee” game of the week is Florida-South Carolina. And those weeks are getting more frequent with each season as teams mitigate their risks with buy games. Second, for the life of me, I haven’t ever heard a single person give a mildly coherent explanation for why a limited playoff (4-8 teams) would do anything but make MORE games meaningful and exciting in the regular season. That historical margin of error is still essentially 1 loss to get in, and would facilitate meaningful cross-conference games at the end of the season. No more Lou Holtz declaring for incomprehensible reasons that a Big 10 team is better than a Pac-10 team, etc.

This isn’t even a debate — the BCS system is just plainly an inferior system to a playoff. Not even close, not an argument, BCS sucks. Period.

Every week college football is exciting. You can name maybe 1/3 of the Texas games this season that actually mean something to the seeding process. Other than that, just win what you can on talent.

Every week I bite my nails during football season. Even in an off week.

I might change a lot of stuff about the BCS, including having some sort o capped margin of victory allowance in the power (i.e., computer) polls – let’s say at 27 points or so… when most teams start putting in their subs. But over all I think it has worked well.

honestly, that doesn’t sound like a problem with the method of determining a champion so much as just not liking basketball.

But you can do that by reweighting SOS versus W/L record in the BCS calculation.

no, you really can’t. At best you can jigger the results around a little.

Just how much weight would you have to give SOS to have it overcome an undefeated season by someone like, say, Texas or Florida or USC? Those teams will, in any normal year, play several good to very-good teams in conference – just how many top-10 teams would someone like TCU need to beat to overcome that? And just how many top-10 teams would they be able to get on their schedule? Just off the top of my head, I’m guessing that the answer to the first is substantially greater than the answer to the second.

And all that’s even assuming you could come up with a “correct” weight for SOS vs. W/L… which I’m highly dubious you could do… there are just too many teams and too few games to provide enough data to make a formula truly valid.